Courier services are specialised in delivering mail pieces of high priority, high value or high sensitivity in express good mailing. Computer systems serving courier services for executing and organising logistic processes and further for the exchange of data with major customers are known.
Generally for international shipment of cargo paperwork concerning the content and customs declaration of mail pieces in form of waybills or shipping lists are mandatory. Additional services e.g. registered letters, additional papers or information in form of large data files are necessary. In some cases processing of shipment documents before the actual arrival of the cargo, e.g. for the reason of custom declaration paperwork, is advantageous.
Traditionally, waybill documents will be affixed to cargo units. Through an electronic submission of shipping documents by the delivery of cargo pieces can, however, may be significantly simplified.
For this reason it is desirable to provide an electronic processing of arbitrary cargo documents. Often, cargo documents are provided as scanned images of hand-written paper documents. Such a scanned document has a large amount of data. Accordingly, it is necessary to take steps to transfer such data to the place of delivery in a dependable and effective way. Due to different available data transmission capacity to the actual location of delivery, a solution must be found to allow an access to image documents with large amount of data in an easy and reliable way, independent of the place of service and independent of locally available data transmission capacity.
The subject innovation relates to distributed computer systems and computer architecture for storing and referencing of large data files.
It is the object of the subject innovation to provide a flexible and time efficient method to pre-deliver shipment documents for custom declaration, pickup and/or delivery of physical objects.
According to the subject innovation, this object is achieved by a method according to claim 1 and a system according to claim 7.
The subject innovation proposes a method for storage of data files on a central file storage, comprising:                notifying at least one local reference storage about storing and/or deleting a data file on a central data repository;        depositing a reference element on the at least one local reference storage after notifying;        requesting a deposited reference element from the local reference storage for demanding a data file contained in the central data repository;        retrieving the demanded data file on submitting the reference element to the central data repository.        
Further the subject innovation proposes a system for storage of large data sets with at least one local reference storage and a central data repository, providing communication interfaces, comprising:                a notification interface for notifying the at least one local reference storage about storing and/or deleting of data files on the central data storage;        a location interface to locate a requested data file of the central data storage by a reference element in the local reference storage;        a retrieval interface to retrieve the data file in the central data storage on submitting the reference element to the central data repository.        
The subject innovation deals with a system for providing easy and effective access with a small handheld terminal with limited storage capacity or a terminal connected via an internet link with limited traffic capacities to large data files e.g. scanned images of freight documents stored on a remote central server.
The main benefit of the proposed architecture is that it allows a single consistent approach to be taken to providing image access across a computer network. This in turn has the potential for a number of common components to be developed only once for the network.
Additionally, the architecture of the subject innovation provides better support for the customer service requirement for accessing images. The original architecture required the customer service agent to go through a number of additional steps in order to actually locate the images that they were interested in. With the architecture proposed in the subject innovation an integrated user interface is being developed that allows a customer service agent to query shipment status and also be presented with the availability of images of waybills or customs declaration documents for that shipment on a local storage and then directly retrieve the chosen image for the central storage server.
As the architecture has local image reference handling component the load associated with retrieving images is distributed across the network. As large data files are “pulled” rather than “pushed” large data traffic on the computer network is minimized.
In an embodiment the subject innovation provides that the reference data is being deposited on a plurality of local reference storages. Information about the index references will be distributed across multiple local references within the network. Thus, transfer times within the network are minimized and so data traffic is not subject to interference or disruption. The data advantageously can be placed on the local references in a preferred order. For example, frequent local references can be stored on a memory with fast availability and low average access time.
The subject innovation also provides a method, wherein a request for a data file can be routed to one selected reference storage under a choice of several local reference storages. In the context of load balancing within a network requests to local references can be conducted such that the network is uniformly and optimally loaded.
The subject innovation also provides a method, wherein the interface receives a data file to locate request information and outputs a reference element in the form of a uniform resource locator and/or a uniform resource number. Referencing to access the image files will be made in a manner that uses consistent references such as Uniform Resource Locators. Moreover, it is possible that these reference numbers are available to access other image transmission technologies such as fax or the like.
The subject innovation also provides a method, wherein the large data file and the data file reference may administrated by a store logic unit. The store logic unit provides a load balanced utilization of the disk media and at the same time provides a reliable assignment of the data to references and indexes.
The subject innovation also provides a method, wherein the location and/or retrieve of data is being conducted by an access server providing a query and/or retrieve logic.
An access server and logic ensures that the service requested by e.g. the references, the requested image files are in a format adapted to the client.
The aforementioned and other aspects of the subject innovation will also be apparent from and elucidated with reference to the embodiments of the subject innovation described herein after making reference to the drawings.